Despite of its strategic role in shaping corporate image, Instagram predicts that 70% of its contents are not seen by users due to content overload and saturation problems. As more than 95 million photos are shared on Instagram on daily basis, when accessing Instagram, users are bombarded with a lot of visual information and consequently tend to selectively choose photos to pay attention to. Therefore, it is important for marketers to design an ads that has the ability to stop consumers and hold their attention for enough time to be processed cognitively before they scroll up or down to see other photos. This study investigates how visual aesthetic, vividness, and message type of pictures posted on Instagram affects customer responses. A content analysis of 3,952 brand content posted between July and December 2017 was conducted from the official Instagram accounts of seven global luxury brands. The top-listed brands on the Luxury Fashion Social Index namely Burberry, Calvin Klein, Chanel, Gucci, Hermes, Louis Vuitton, and Prada; were investigated as they were considered as good representatives of luxury brands with good social media presence. The coding guide in this study included the numbers of consumer responses (likes and comments), visual aesthetic (classical and expressive), vividness (high and low), and message type (literal and symbolic). For the independent variables, binary coding was used. ANOVA was used to test the hypotheses. Findings suggest that brand posts using expressive aesthetic image received more likes and comments on Instagram than the ones with classical aesthetics. Brand posts with high level of vividness receive more likes and comments than the ones with low level of vividness. Brand posts adopting using symbolic message receive more likes and comments than the ones implementing literal message. The results also suggest that there was a significant interaction between visual aesthetics, vividness, and message types in generating likes Brand content on Instagram using a combination of expressive aesthetic, high vivid, and symbolic message generates more likes and comments than any other combinations. Instead, the content adopting a combination of classical aesthetic, low vivid, and literal message produced the least responses. From theoretical perspective, findings can extend and modify media richness theory to luxury brand and social media contexts. Instagram can be used to display brand contents with various levels of vividness. This study imply that luxury consumers favor expressive aesthetics and symbolic message more positively indicating that they tend to have high level of need for cognition in consuming brand messages. Luxury brand marketers can increase their cognitive load by increasing the level of information complexity increasing the number of colors or patterns, using metaphoric statements, or crafting symbolic messages when creating brand posts on Instagram.

This study investigates whether goods and service brands have different social media strategy to develop relationships with consumers. A content analysis of 10,752 brand posts on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube accounts of 10 Indonesian leading brands finds that goods and service brands have different strategies in utilizing their social media.